Guest blogger: Matt Seaton

February is for fakeology. March is for mendacity.

Editor’s note: Bill Strickland is taking a short break from The Selection to do a little extra work on the print magazine for Bicycling. In the meantime, we invited a handful of cycling bloggers to submit a post in the spirit of this blog. We hope you enjoy.

Cyclists are the biggest liars, especially at the beginning of the year. Spring is the season for the worst kind of self-deprecating BS. How many conversations have you had already, lining up for the first few races, where teammates and rivals alike will try to convince you that they've done no miles, they've got no kind of legs, they're still 10 pounds overweight, they're going to get dropped on the first lap … [you fill in the blank]?

And then what do they do? Go straight to the front and rip everyone's legs off.

So, when they said they'd done no road miles, that was literally true; they just omitted to mention that they've spent the past four weeks on the indoor trainer, doing 10-minute 400W intervals four times a week. Either that or the road miles they just did at the training camp they attended somewhere southwest and warm are somehow in parenthesis and did not merit disclosure.

There is a natural enough human impulse in this syndrome. None of us feel anywhere near the peak of our form, whatever we've done over the winter. We genuinely don't know “how we're going” in the only test that counts: racing against our peers. So, given the self-doubt, it seems safest to downplay the fitness we do, in fact, have.

And the opening races of the season are ample cause for anxiety: Most of us haven't ridden in the wheels at speed since last September, and the reflexes are a bit rusty, our trust in other riders more conditional. As race promoter and former US pro champion John Eustice said to a couple of us the other day, as we rode around Central Park at a sedate pace, “You have to learn to be stupid again.” That takes a few races, given that, as each season passes, we each wear a bit more scar tissue from the roadrash of a painful spill somewhere back down the road.

So, yes, there are some mitigating circumstances for all this serial lying about training. But only some. The real problem is not our individual fears about form, or lack of it; the roots of the phenomenon are the cultural conventions themselves of bike racing. Fibbing about how little training we've done and our supposed lack of race-readiness has all the exaggerated, encoded formality of the 18th-century pre-revolution French court. It is a politesse of the peloton. The true state of affairs in these exchanges, as we all know yet simultaneously choose not to know, is that both interlocutors understand any such statement to be largely fictional; both understand and respectfully observe the conventional forms, while privately discounting for the inherent falsehood.

And of course, such a contradictory code of etiquette could only develop in a sport that rewards passive aggression, in which the most effective method of winning is to save your own strength until the moment of your rivals' greatest vulnerability—and then strike. The tactics of cycle racing being reducible, to paraphrase Tim Krabbé from The Rider here, to how to kick your opponent when he's down without actually kicking him.

In all honesty, cycling's weird and somewhat warped code of honour is one of the things I love about it. So, do I really want to unwind all that by pleading for some uncharacteristic start-line candour? Would I actually be happier listening to someone boasting about their awesome lactic threshold numbers, rather than BS'ing me about their feebleness? Obviously, not. But perhaps, let's let the legs do the talking, and find another subject for conversation beforehand.

About The Selection

Editor-at-large Bill Strickland brings you his take on the cycling news, cultural occurrences, cool products, memes and shared experiences that define the life of a cyclist. Follow his twitter feed at @TrueBS.